of inferences based on only a narrow range of excavated material. On the other hand, the historian Gerald Killan’s David Boyle: From Artisan to Archaeologist (1983) paid considerable attention to the social as well as the intellectual milieu that shaped the career of that nineteenth-century Ontario archaeologist. One encounters in archaeological biographies a similar range of approaches to that found in other studies relating to the history of the discipline.

Despite the influence of relativists such as Collingwood, Australian archaeologistTim Murray has rightly suggested that “much of the history of archaeology reads as an account of the slow journey out of the darkness of subjectivity and speculation towards objectivity, rationality, and science” (1989, 56). One might have expected that such an approach would have appealed to processual archaeologists, yet, in general, processual archaeologists rejected and trivialized the history of archaeology, even though they welcomed Willey and Sabloff’s historical charter. In his Behavioral Archeology (1976), Michael Schiffer pronounced that “graduate courses should cease being histories of thought” and concentrate instead on communicating the established principles of the discipline and indicating future lines of inquiry (p. 193). If carefully formulated techniques of analysis and an expanding corpus of data can produce increasingly accurate approximations of the past and more accurate theories, the history of archaeology is irrelevant to its past or future practice. If, on the other hand, the relativists are correct, facts constitute the core of archaeology while interpretations amount to little more than a history of personal opinions.

Social Histories

In Britain, the 1970s witnessed the development of the history of archaeology in the direction of social history. Both social and intellectual history share a relativist view of knowledge, but social history is concerned with how economic, political, and social conditions influence the interpretation of archaeological data. Because of this focus on the relationship between archaeological understanding and the sociocultural context in which archaeology is practiced, social history is more broadly externalist than intellectual history, which at most seeks to understand how archaeological interpretations relate to the contemporary intellectual milieu. Thus, social history stands at the opposite extreme from an internalist approach, which aims to delineate only the changing understanding of a problem by archaeologists. The distinction between externalist and internalist approaches is the same one that an older generation of historians drew between intellectual history and the history of ideas.

The social history of archaeology developed as an unforeseen consequence of Daniel’s efforts to promote the study of the history of archaeology around the world, for such studies drew archaeologists’ attention to the very different conditions under which archaeology was practiced. Ole Klindt-Jensen’s A History of Scandinavian Archaeology (1975) and ignacio bernal garcia’s A History of Mexican Archaeology (1980) were both commissioned for Daniel’s World of Archaeology series. Each author traced the successive impacts of renaissance, rationalist, romantic, and positivist thought on the development of archaeology in a different part of the world. Klindt-Jensen went further, however, and delineated the political conditions that he believed had promoted the development of antiquarianism and the beginnings of scientific archaeology in Scandinavia. In tracing subsequent developments, he stressed the impact that changing political and economic circumstances had on archaeology in each Scandinavian country.

Partly inspired, although he only grudgingly admitted it, by Benjamin Keen’s superb history of The Aztec Image in Western Thought (1971), Ignacio Bernal examined in detail the differing attitudes toward the study of pre-Columbian mexico adopted by Spanish officials and Creoles prior to Mexico’s independence, liberals, and conservatives during the nineteenth century, and the Mexican government between 1920 and 1950. He also demonstrated how the institutional setting of Mexican archaeology was molded by political events and how it, in turn, influenced the character of Mexican archaeology. Bernal has perhaps gone further than any other historian of archaeology in delineating the